You do not know you are in a recession until after it happens.
Well, you can't know (under one common definition) until you've already been in it for at least half a year (that doesn't mean its over).
How do you know we're not spiraling into a depression?
A depression isn't a term with any generally accepted concrete definition, its just a common term for a really severe recession. So if we're "spiraling into a depression", we then, ipso facto, are either in a recession or have one looming.
What about the article in the constitution that says government may only legislate on those matters that are allowed in the constitution?
There is no such article pertaining to government, per se, which is why state governments have general police powers limited (by the federal constitution) only by express limitations in the Constitution.
Or do search engines fall under the "interstate commerce" joker?
Since they are clearly commercial operations involved in transactions that do cross state lines, they do even under narrow interpretations of "interstate commerce", much less the broad interpretation that courts actually use exemplified by Wickard v. Filburn.
Does Microsoft really believe that everyone is out to get them
No, they just want other people to believe that's the reason for criticism. Its called "propaganda". (Or, to use the popular euphemism, "public relations".)
If it wasn't for their 'IP policy,' we wouldn't have half the problems we do with 'interoperability.'
Microsoft does very little to hide that "interoperability" is something they are mostly interested in obstructing as it undermines their business model. Likely, Tsilas job as "senior director of interoperability and IP policy" is to leverage IP policy to prevent interoperability and thereby promote lock-in to MS products.
Interoperability would make MS products replaceable commodities that would have to compete on price, support quality, and features other than ability to work well with legacy MS documents and other MS products. Which is the last thing MS wants.
Anti-religious people (Stalin, etc.) kill people, too, not just religious people. Any ideology which isn't unconditionally against killing (religious or otherwise) will be leveraged, either by its honest extreme adherents or by opportunists leveraging the appeal the ideology has to the masses, for killing. And ideologies which are unconditionally against killing will typically be bent out of shape to support killing, and then have the same thing done with them.
These people have it backwards. The real reason that people who graduate in science, engineering and medicine are over-represented in terrorist organizations is because those are the degrees that it is useful to have in a terrorist organzation.
This hypothesis is explored, analyzed, and rejected as a significant contributor to the observed disproportionality in the paper under discussion. If you want to add something useful to the discussion, perhaps you'd like to address the discussion in the paper about it rather than just rattling off that it must be true because it seems intuitively likely to you.
The biggest Spring feature - it can use the whole gamut of Java technologies.
That's true of most Java frameworks, and many non-Java frameworks that happen to run on the JVM.
But I was not even able to _find_ a distributed transaction manager for RoR!
I'm not sure what this has to do with Spring's superiority to other IoC (in the dependency injection sense) frameworks since RoR is not an IoC framework, and distributed transactions are a service, not an element of IoC. Really, Spring is a pretty big application framework that happens to provide IoC/AOP features as well as lots of specific services. But nothing of what you've said really explains what makes it a good IoC framework.
But, yeah, that Spring provides a distributed transaction manager that Grails can leverage is an advantage for Grails over Rails for some use cases; it is only tangentially related to IoC, though.
In fact, when it comes to IoC, many have argued (including Jamis Buck, who wrote two of the best known Ruby IoC frameworks) that Ruby doesn't need frameworks at all, because it can do all the things done by such frameworks directly, simply, and naturally, and that "frameworks" don't generally simplify things more than what the language already provides: in Java, bulky IoC frameworks are needed to work around the inflexibility of the language. In Ruby, if you want to use inversion of control you can just do it fairly directly and naturally.
But, yes, the Java platform has been around the enterprise for quite a while, and has more mature libraries for lots of enterprise-desirable tasks, like distributed transaction management. And integration with existing Java technologies like that is a strength of Grails.
There is a lot more to patterns than cutting and pasting.
That's true. The right thing to do with patterns is use them as observations of needs in language and library design: anything that is frequently repeated in code should be abstracted out. Unfortunately, Java doesn't have the kind of flexibility that makes abstracting a lot of common patterns out, and so instead of being observations that serve as the basis for abstraction, they become guidelines. This is why frameworks that do manage to support abstracting many common patterns out for Java often rely on non-Java constructs (most often XML) to do so, because Java doesn't provide the needed features at the language level to usefully abstract out those patterns.
This is also why dynamic languages that have more of the needed flexibility (whether "generic" ones like Ruby or Python, or ones developed for the JVM like Groovy) are likely to play an increasingly important role in development for the Java platform: they let these patterns be supported at the language and library level without resort to XML or something similar.
A good majority of design patterns existed long before Java as well, so are you saying that all languages that use design patterns suck?
Any language in which a task is best handled repeated use of a particular design pattern that does not allow that pattern to be elegantly factored out is, in that respect, less than ideal for that task. It may still be the best choice because of other reasons that outweigh that kind of consideration -- particularly performance reasons for relatively low-level system languages (ASM, C, arguably Java as the core language on the JVM, if not necessarily Java for application development.)
Spring blows almost everything out of water - it's very powerful and easy to use, and it can be integrated easy enough with _everything_. Even for very complex applications.
Are you comparing it to other Java IoC frameworks, or other IOC frameworks regardless of language? To me, some of the dynamic language IoC frameworks (though generally younger and somewhat less mature) seem to have a lot of desirable features, particularly many of them tend to be very well integrated into the host language without requiring external configuration (Spring, though I've only looked at descriptions of it, seems to be, in the typical Java-framework way, very XML-configuration heavy to get around the limitations of Java.)
Of course, there's less demand for dynamic-language IoC frameworks because some of the problems IoC is intended to solve are a less pressing (though not at all absent) when using many dynamic languages, and because those languages make it less painful to do "good enough" IoC without a framework, both of which reduce the motivation to build such frameworks in dynamic languages.
Islam is a young, viral religion. There was another young, viral religion which not but a millenia ago murdered people for centuries.
Religions don't kill people, people kill people. Sometimes religious (or anti-religious, as in the sense of Leninism and its descendants) ideology is part of the excuse. "Young" doesn't seem to have much to do with it; people have been killed with Christianity and Judaism (or specific subsets of them) as part of the excuse a lot more recently than "a millenia ago" (and probably more recently than "a day ago".)
I think there's a bit of a difference in "I'm always right" as opposed to "I'm going to kill those that don't think like me". Though IANATerrorist.
IANATerrorist, either, but I think that many terrorist probably don't think "I'm going to kill those that don't think like me". Many, I would expect, probably think something more like "It is self-evident that if people who thought like me were in charge, the country/world/etc. would be so much better of a place that it is worth killing quite a few people, especially those that oppose what is so clearly good for everyone and who therefore must be acting out of ill-will, to get there."
You would probably be less confused in you read the paper before arguing against it.
Are you saying I'm rejecting their hypothesis that Engineers are more aggressively recruited because of their valuable skillset?
No, I'm saying that that hypothesis, which you raise as if the authors failed to consider it, is a hypothesis they consider in the paper, and that they present (on pp. 40-41, section headed "Selection based on technical skills") arguments for rejecting as a substantial contributor to the observed overrepresentation, arguments which your casual "or maybe..." fails to address or acknowledge.
Leave it to a sociologist to claim there is no such thing as one solution being better than others.
Please point to the place in the paper where the sociologists writing the paper, or any other sociologist, claimed that. I'll help: they didn't.
What they did suggest is that there is reason to believe that engineers (who work in a field where, indeed, there often is a clearly superior solution and, in any case, where there are usually clear, objective criteria for evaluating solutions) are more likely to be people who are attracted to the idea that it is generally (rather than merely in specific fields like, say, addressing narrow engineering questions) true that there is a clear, objective, obvious right way to do things. Note that this goes beyond merely believing that there is one right solution, but as far as believing that the solutions tend to be so obvious that there is no substantial room for discussion or rational disagreement as to what that solution is. Now, there are clearly questions for which such a view is both accurate and useful to getting things done both correctly and efficiently, but there are certainly also areas where it is not.
The quotes around "terrorist mindset" suggesting that the article uses that description, it does not, and nowhere does it suggest that Engineers are more inclined than others to be terrorists or violent extremists.
It does find them more likely to be Islamists, more likely to be violent Islamists, and more likely to be right-wing extremists, but also notes that this stands in contrast to their under-representation among left-wing extremist groups (violent or otherwise).
While Islamic terrorism certainly gets a lot of attention these days, neither "terrorism" nor "violent extremism" are exclusively associated with Islamism or other right-wing ideologies.
Though its interesting to note that in one of the studies of professional outlooks from the Middle East that the paper cites, engineers had the second highest tendency to simultaneously hold strongly religious and strongly conservative views, behind engineers.
Should be:
Though its interesting to note that in one of the studies of professional outlooks from the Middle East that the paper cites, engineers had the second highest tendency to simultaneously hold strongly religious and strongly conservative views, behind managers.
Frederick W. Taylor, advocate of "scientific management," and who literally articulated as a principle that everything could and should be done in "the one best way." In my experience, it is managers, not engineers, who tend to have the "one best way" mindset.
That managers may disproportionately have this mindset (and may do so even more than engineers) is not an argument that engineers don't, even if it was supported by evidence. As the paper focussed mostly on degree and area of study, not profession, "Managers" aren't a group called out for study and comparison. Though its interesting to note that in one of the studies of professional outlooks from the Middle East that the paper cites, engineers had the second highest tendency to simultaneously hold strongly religious and strongly conservative views, behind engineers.
I find this paper very disturbing.
You seem to be judging it without reading it, which I find disturbing.
I lived through the McCarthy years... There was no definition of the word "Communist." A communist meant anyone the government didn't like. If you pointed out that some reputed "Communist" was, simply, factually, not a Communist, not only did it not matter but it made you suspect yourself. (During the McCarthy era, for example, all homosexuals were automatically "Communists.")
These days, the word "terrist" seems to have the same sort of elusive meaning.
While the paper refers to terrorism, it does not (contrary to TFA and TFS) suggest that engineers have a particular propensity to be terrorist. It discusses their disproportionate overrepresentation in Islamic extremist groups in general, in violent Islamic extremist groups, and in right-wing extremist groups, and also mentions there near-absence from left-wing extremist groups.
The idea that the paper indicates that engineers have a terrorist mindset is a complete fabrication in TFA; it is neither a conclusion of the paper nor a reasonable extrapolation from anything in the paper.
Well, it's not surprising that people studying useful subjects are overrepresented among Islamists in the UK.
The study is not of "Islamists in the UK". That a study is conducted by researchers at a university located in the UK does not mean the geographical scope of the study happens to be the UK.
Or maybe it's that Engineers are recruited more aggressively than liberal arts majors because likely to bring useful skills and a concrete, analytical mindset to the mission.
The paper at issue discusses this possibility on pp. 40-41. While you have modded "insightful" by others who have, presumably, also not bothered to even glance at the paper (the four hypotheses considered are listed in the abstract, after all), you've simply pointed to one of the hypotheses considered, analyzed in light of the evidence, and rejected as not likely significant in explaining the overrepresentation in the paper being discussed. Now, if you had taken the step of challenging their reasoning in rejecting it and presenting a counterargument to it, that might present something "insightful", or at least "interesting".
in my experience, engineers, if anything, tend to be anti-religious, socially liberal types who constantly look for rational, provable solutions to the world's problems.
On the one hand, we have your "in my experience" anecdotal claim that "engineers, if anything, tend to be anti-religious, socially liberal types", and on the other, we have the the various systematic cited in the paper that show that academic engineers and engineering students in the are both, by self-identification, more religious and more conservative than academics and students in other disciplines.
It should be noted that due to US immigration restrictions, 80% of muslims migrating to the US are highly educated. Engineers. This should somehow skew the results.
Ignoring questions of the provenance and reliability of those numbers, sure, that could conceivably affect the results regarding Islamist groups in the US; it clearly doesn't have much to say about those of Islamist groups in the Middle East and North Africa or Singapore, which are also part of the study.
From reading the article, it seems to me Diego and Steve [yeah, sounds like a gay disco duo] have never met parents from the Middle East. Basically, a kids has one of two choices about higher education: medicine or engineering.
Even granting that that is the gospel, unquestionable truth, so what? You seem not to know what "overrepresented" means: that is represented in greater proportion than in the population. So if most people in the Middle East had either medical or engineering degrees, that wouldn't explain the overrepresentation of those degrees in Islamist groups, since the proportion in the population doesn't explain overrepresentation since that is measured with respect to the population.
Beyond that, even if that somehow did explain the overrepresentation of those (and elite degrees in general) in Middle-Eastern-origin Islamists, it wouldn't explain why engineering degrees but not degrees in medicine or other elite fields are overrepresented in violent Islamist groups from those regions, or why engineers are overrepresented in Islamist groups outside of that region while other elite degrees are not.
Authors Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog chalk this all up to what they call the 'engineering mindset,' which they define as 'a mindset that inclines them to take more extreme conservative and religious positions.' Is this just pop psychology masquerading as science?
No. Read the paper. First: they don't "chalk this all up to what they call they 'engineering mindset'." Considering four possible explanations for the overrepresentation of engineers in light of the evidence, they conclude that the most likely two explanations involve (1) social conditions experienced by engineers and other elite-degree holders in the Middle East and North Africa region, and (2) the engineering mindset. The first explains why elite degree holders in general (including engineers) are overrepresented in Islamist groups originating in the Middle East and North Africa, whereas elite degree holders in general are not overepresented in Islamist groups in the West and elsewhere. The second, they argue, explains why engineers are over-represented in Islamist groups everywhere, and in violent Islamist groups in the Middle East and North Africa, even though elite degree holders in general are not overrepresented in the former, and non-engineering elite degree holders are not overrepresented in the latter (but engineering degree holders are so overrepresented as to constitute overrepresentation of elite degree holders in general without overrepresentation of other elite degree holders.)
They present independent evidence of the (politically) conservative tendency of engineers and engineering students, and of their religious tendencies. Really, read the paper. Its fine to disagree with it, its fine to criticize it. But do it based on what's in it, not based on knee-jerk reaction to an oversimplified presentation of its conclusions.
One can text multiple people at the same time while talking is one-to-one communication.
Talking can be many-to-many (its frequently that outside of the telephone context, of course, and conference calls do exist), though convenient ad hoc conference calling isn't usually a feature of cell phones.
Not that I'd ever thought about it before this message, but that could be a really convenient feature if you could develop a good interface for it (better than the typical three-way calling, and easier to set-up on the spur of the moment than a typical call-in conference.)
Slashdot Mirror
It is so surprising that Pope Benedict XVI would criticize the same thing, and on the same basis, that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had previously criticized under its then-Prefect, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.
Strictly speaking, E should also include "...or there are no small positive numbers."
Well, you can't know (under one common definition) until you've already been in it for at least half a year (that doesn't mean its over).
A depression isn't a term with any generally accepted concrete definition, its just a common term for a really severe recession. So if we're "spiraling into a depression", we then, ipso facto, are either in a recession or have one looming.
There is no such article pertaining to government, per se, which is why state governments have general police powers limited (by the federal constitution) only by express limitations in the Constitution.
Since they are clearly commercial operations involved in transactions that do cross state lines, they do even under narrow interpretations of "interstate commerce", much less the broad interpretation that courts actually use exemplified by Wickard v. Filburn.
No, they just want other people to believe that's the reason for criticism. Its called "propaganda". (Or, to use the popular euphemism, "public relations".)
Microsoft does very little to hide that "interoperability" is something they are mostly interested in obstructing as it undermines their business model. Likely, Tsilas job as "senior director of interoperability and IP policy" is to leverage IP policy to prevent interoperability and thereby promote lock-in to MS products.
Interoperability would make MS products replaceable commodities that would have to compete on price, support quality, and features other than ability to work well with legacy MS documents and other MS products. Which is the last thing MS wants.
Fixed that for you.
Anti-religious people (Stalin, etc.) kill people, too, not just religious people. Any ideology which isn't unconditionally against killing (religious or otherwise) will be leveraged, either by its honest extreme adherents or by opportunists leveraging the appeal the ideology has to the masses, for killing. And ideologies which are unconditionally against killing will typically be bent out of shape to support killing, and then have the same thing done with them.
The problem is mostly orthogonal to religion.
This hypothesis is explored, analyzed, and rejected as a significant contributor to the observed disproportionality in the paper under discussion. If you want to add something useful to the discussion, perhaps you'd like to address the discussion in the paper about it rather than just rattling off that it must be true because it seems intuitively likely to you.
That's true of most Java frameworks, and many non-Java frameworks that happen to run on the JVM.
I'm not sure what this has to do with Spring's superiority to other IoC (in the dependency injection sense) frameworks since RoR is not an IoC framework, and distributed transactions are a service, not an element of IoC. Really, Spring is a pretty big application framework that happens to provide IoC/AOP features as well as lots of specific services. But nothing of what you've said really explains what makes it a good IoC framework.
But, yeah, that Spring provides a distributed transaction manager that Grails can leverage is an advantage for Grails over Rails for some use cases; it is only tangentially related to IoC, though.
In fact, when it comes to IoC, many have argued (including Jamis Buck, who wrote two of the best known Ruby IoC frameworks) that Ruby doesn't need frameworks at all, because it can do all the things done by such frameworks directly, simply, and naturally, and that "frameworks" don't generally simplify things more than what the language already provides: in Java, bulky IoC frameworks are needed to work around the inflexibility of the language. In Ruby, if you want to use inversion of control you can just do it fairly directly and naturally.
But, yes, the Java platform has been around the enterprise for quite a while, and has more mature libraries for lots of enterprise-desirable tasks, like distributed transaction management. And integration with existing Java technologies like that is a strength of Grails.
That's true. The right thing to do with patterns is use them as observations of needs in language and library design: anything that is frequently repeated in code should be abstracted out. Unfortunately, Java doesn't have the kind of flexibility that makes abstracting a lot of common patterns out, and so instead of being observations that serve as the basis for abstraction, they become guidelines. This is why frameworks that do manage to support abstracting many common patterns out for Java often rely on non-Java constructs (most often XML) to do so, because Java doesn't provide the needed features at the language level to usefully abstract out those patterns.
This is also why dynamic languages that have more of the needed flexibility (whether "generic" ones like Ruby or Python, or ones developed for the JVM like Groovy) are likely to play an increasingly important role in development for the Java platform: they let these patterns be supported at the language and library level without resort to XML or something similar.
Any language in which a task is best handled repeated use of a particular design pattern that does not allow that pattern to be elegantly factored out is, in that respect, less than ideal for that task. It may still be the best choice because of other reasons that outweigh that kind of consideration -- particularly performance reasons for relatively low-level system languages (ASM, C, arguably Java as the core language on the JVM, if not necessarily Java for application development.)
Are you comparing it to other Java IoC frameworks, or other IOC frameworks regardless of language? To me, some of the dynamic language IoC frameworks (though generally younger and somewhat less mature) seem to have a lot of desirable features, particularly many of them tend to be very well integrated into the host language without requiring external configuration (Spring, though I've only looked at descriptions of it, seems to be, in the typical Java-framework way, very XML-configuration heavy to get around the limitations of Java.)
Of course, there's less demand for dynamic-language IoC frameworks because some of the problems IoC is intended to solve are a less pressing (though not at all absent) when using many dynamic languages, and because those languages make it less painful to do "good enough" IoC without a framework, both of which reduce the motivation to build such frameworks in dynamic languages.
Religions don't kill people, people kill people. Sometimes religious (or anti-religious, as in the sense of Leninism and its descendants) ideology is part of the excuse. "Young" doesn't seem to have much to do with it; people have been killed with Christianity and Judaism (or specific subsets of them) as part of the excuse a lot more recently than "a millenia ago" (and probably more recently than "a day ago".)
IANATerrorist, either, but I think that many terrorist probably don't think "I'm going to kill those that don't think like me". Many, I would expect, probably think something more like "It is self-evident that if people who thought like me were in charge, the country/world/etc. would be so much better of a place that it is worth killing quite a few people, especially those that oppose what is so clearly good for everyone and who therefore must be acting out of ill-will, to get there."
You would probably be less confused in you read the paper before arguing against it.
No, I'm saying that that hypothesis, which you raise as if the authors failed to consider it, is a hypothesis they consider in the paper, and that they present (on pp. 40-41, section headed "Selection based on technical skills") arguments for rejecting as a substantial contributor to the observed overrepresentation, arguments which your casual "or maybe..." fails to address or acknowledge.
Please point to the place in the paper where the sociologists writing the paper, or any other sociologist, claimed that. I'll help: they didn't.
What they did suggest is that there is reason to believe that engineers (who work in a field where, indeed, there often is a clearly superior solution and, in any case, where there are usually clear, objective criteria for evaluating solutions) are more likely to be people who are attracted to the idea that it is generally (rather than merely in specific fields like, say, addressing narrow engineering questions) true that there is a clear, objective, obvious right way to do things. Note that this goes beyond merely believing that there is one right solution, but as far as believing that the solutions tend to be so obvious that there is no substantial room for discussion or rational disagreement as to what that solution is. Now, there are clearly questions for which such a view is both accurate and useful to getting things done both correctly and efficiently, but there are certainly also areas where it is not.
The quotes around "terrorist mindset" suggesting that the article uses that description, it does not, and nowhere does it suggest that Engineers are more inclined than others to be terrorists or violent extremists.
It does find them more likely to be Islamists, more likely to be violent Islamists, and more likely to be right-wing extremists, but also notes that this stands in contrast to their under-representation among left-wing extremist groups (violent or otherwise).
While Islamic terrorism certainly gets a lot of attention these days, neither "terrorism" nor "violent extremism" are exclusively associated with Islamism or other right-wing ideologies.
Should be:
That managers may disproportionately have this mindset (and may do so even more than engineers) is not an argument that engineers don't, even if it was supported by evidence. As the paper focussed mostly on degree and area of study, not profession, "Managers" aren't a group called out for study and comparison. Though its interesting to note that in one of the studies of professional outlooks from the Middle East that the paper cites, engineers had the second highest tendency to simultaneously hold strongly religious and strongly conservative views, behind engineers.
You seem to be judging it without reading it, which I find disturbing.
While the paper refers to terrorism, it does not (contrary to TFA and TFS) suggest that engineers have a particular propensity to be terrorist. It discusses their disproportionate overrepresentation in Islamic extremist groups in general, in violent Islamic extremist groups, and in right-wing extremist groups, and also mentions there near-absence from left-wing extremist groups.
The idea that the paper indicates that engineers have a terrorist mindset is a complete fabrication in TFA; it is neither a conclusion of the paper nor a reasonable extrapolation from anything in the paper.
The study is not of "Islamists in the UK". That a study is conducted by researchers at a university located in the UK does not mean the geographical scope of the study happens to be the UK.
The paper at issue discusses this possibility on pp. 40-41. While you have modded "insightful" by others who have, presumably, also not bothered to even glance at the paper (the four hypotheses considered are listed in the abstract, after all), you've simply pointed to one of the hypotheses considered, analyzed in light of the evidence, and rejected as not likely significant in explaining the overrepresentation in the paper being discussed. Now, if you had taken the step of challenging their reasoning in rejecting it and presenting a counterargument to it, that might present something "insightful", or at least "interesting".
On the one hand, we have your "in my experience" anecdotal claim that "engineers, if anything, tend to be anti-religious, socially liberal types", and on the other, we have the the various systematic cited in the paper that show that academic engineers and engineering students in the are both, by self-identification, more religious and more conservative than academics and students in other disciplines.
Ignoring questions of the provenance and reliability of those numbers, sure, that could conceivably affect the results regarding Islamist groups in the US; it clearly doesn't have much to say about those of Islamist groups in the Middle East and North Africa or Singapore, which are also part of the study.
Even granting that that is the gospel, unquestionable truth, so what? You seem not to know what "overrepresented" means: that is represented in greater proportion than in the population. So if most people in the Middle East had either medical or engineering degrees, that wouldn't explain the overrepresentation of those degrees in Islamist groups, since the proportion in the population doesn't explain overrepresentation since that is measured with respect to the population.
Beyond that, even if that somehow did explain the overrepresentation of those (and elite degrees in general) in Middle-Eastern-origin Islamists, it wouldn't explain why engineering degrees but not degrees in medicine or other elite fields are overrepresented in violent Islamist groups from those regions, or why engineers are overrepresented in Islamist groups outside of that region while other elite degrees are not.
No. Read the paper. First: they don't "chalk this all up to what they call they 'engineering mindset'." Considering four possible explanations for the overrepresentation of engineers in light of the evidence, they conclude that the most likely two explanations involve (1) social conditions experienced by engineers and other elite-degree holders in the Middle East and North Africa region, and (2) the engineering mindset. The first explains why elite degree holders in general (including engineers) are overrepresented in Islamist groups originating in the Middle East and North Africa, whereas elite degree holders in general are not overepresented in Islamist groups in the West and elsewhere. The second, they argue, explains why engineers are over-represented in Islamist groups everywhere, and in violent Islamist groups in the Middle East and North Africa, even though elite degree holders in general are not overrepresented in the former, and non-engineering elite degree holders are not overrepresented in the latter (but engineering degree holders are so overrepresented as to constitute overrepresentation of elite degree holders in general without overrepresentation of other elite degree holders.)
They present independent evidence of the (politically) conservative tendency of engineers and engineering students, and of their religious tendencies. Really, read the paper. Its fine to disagree with it, its fine to criticize it. But do it based on what's in it, not based on knee-jerk reaction to an oversimplified presentation of its conclusions.
Talking can be many-to-many (its frequently that outside of the telephone context, of course, and conference calls do exist), though convenient ad hoc conference calling isn't usually a feature of cell phones.
Not that I'd ever thought about it before this message, but that could be a really convenient feature if you could develop a good interface for it (better than the typical three-way calling, and easier to set-up on the spur of the moment than a typical call-in conference.)